Consider the Beef Business Future

Feeding a growing population will take some innovative thinking in the years ahead. As we look to the future, New Mexico State University regent’s Ag Econ professor and futurist Dr. Lowell Catlett says it will take different types of beef operations to feed the world in the future.

 

Catlett: “To get more pounds of beef to feed a hungry world, you’ve gotta have a very efficient operation and that is intensive animal agriculture but it exists side by side with people who can do organic and pasturial agriculture. But you gotta have them both in a world that is affluent because people buy them both.”

 

Catlett challenges ranchers to think beyond the current beef business  and focus on growing technological possibilities.

 

Catlett: "We are now moving toward looking at an individual animal and saying, ‘we now can get that DNA for that individual animal, not just the DNA for beef or for Angus but for that animal. So I have that individual animal’s profile. We’ve got great genetics and you’ll start looking at those genetics and you’ll have all these new tools of taking that N of 1 with some other profiles and you are going to just raise their health and their productivity in ways that we can even fathom today.”